Giuseppe Labianca

University of Massachusetts Amherst | UMass Amherst · Isenberg School of Management

Collecting social network data among organization members using surveys is challenging and requires a well-considered strategy. Based on extensive past experience with collecting social network information in work organizations with surveys, we identify and discuss four major elements of the data collection process, all linked with and dependent on...

The upheaval created by a merger can precipitate voluntary employee turnover, causing merging organizations to lose valuable knowledge-based resources and competencies precisely when they are needed most to achieve the merger's integration goals. While prior research has shown that employees' connections to coworkers reduce their likelihood of leav...

Some relationships harm. Others are characterised by avoidance, dislike, or conflict. These relationships – known in the social networks literature as negative ties – are pervasive, arising in virtually all settings, including the family, workplace, school, neighbourhood, politics, within and between organisations, and international relations. Whil...

Although most social network research in organizations has focused on positive and neutral social relationships between employees and their importance for bringing together individuals and supporting organizational functioning, there has been a growing interest in understanding the origins and effects of negative relationships, such as interpersona...

This study takes an affiliative coping theory perspective to examine whether working adults reactivated dormant ties with individuals they had not contacted for at least 3 years to cope with stressors experienced due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Stressors originating in the workplace (job insecurity and remote work) and in the family (stressful famili...

Individuals interacting in organizational settings involving varying levels of formal hierarchy naturally form a complex network of social ties having different tie valences (e.g., positive and negative connections). Social ties critically affect employees’ satisfaction, behaviors, cognition, and outcomes — yet identifying them solely through surve...

We examine the affective content of ties and explore whether negative affective tie content is systematically advantaged or disadvantaged when recalling the social network as compared to positive affective tie content. We test this in three workgroups from two organizations and analyze differences in perceptual accuracy comparing negative and posit...

Brokerage has assumed an increasingly important role in social network research and organizing more generally. Social network research has traditionally defined brokerage in structural terms as a broker who stands between two disconnected parties. Alongside this structural definition, network research has generally made assumptions about, but rarel...

Recent scholarship finds that informal relationships that convey information such as work-related advice and knowledge are critical paths that supplement the formallyprescribed relationships and knowledge flows in organizations. Most studies treat these informal relationships as neutral channels or pipes conveying information throughout the organiz...

We adopt a sociopolitical perspective to examine how an employee's political skill works in conjunction with social network structure to relate to the employee's innovation involvement and job performance. We find that employee innovation involvement mediates the relationship between political skill and job performance and that the number of struct...

Integrating insights from the organizational social networks and workplace affect literatures, the authors propose a dynamic model of relationships, focusing on the affect experienced within dyadic work relationships to predict their trajectory over time: either improving, declining, or static. The feelings each partner typically experiences within...

This symposium focuses on the intersection of relational and social network research with a socio-functional view of emotions, which argues that affective exchanges actively shape relational dynamics. The aim of the present symposium is to provide further insight into the dynamic interplay between emotions, relationships and social networks, taking...

In July 2017, Dr. Barbara Gray was honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award from the IACM during its 30th annual conference in Berlin, Germany. In this tribute article, we celebrate Barbara's unique and varied contributions to our understanding of conflict and collaboration. We highlight multiple aspects of Barbara's scholarly work including res...

In July 2017, Dr. Barbara Gray was honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award from the IACM during its 30th annual conference in Berlin, Germany. In this tribute article, we celebrate Barbara's unique and varied contributions to our understanding of conflict and collaboration. We highlight multiple aspects of Barbara's scholarly work including res...

Individuals differ in how accurately they perceive their social environment, but research and theory provide conflicting predictions on whether powerful people are more or less accurate than others. Drawing on social network theory and the situated cognition theory of power, we examine the relationship between individuals' formal and informal power...

While most social network studies of employee innovation behavior examine the focal employees’ (“egos’”) network structure, we employ an alter-centric perspective to study the personal characteristics of employees’ network contacts—their “alters”—to better understand employee innovation. Specifically, we examine how the creative self-efficacy (CSE)...

The authors used pre-post merger data from 599 employees experiencing a major corporate merger to compare 3 conceptual models based on the logic of social identity theory (SIT) and exchange theory to explain employees’ merger responses. At issue is how perceived change in employees’ own jobs and roles (i.e., personal valence) and perceived change i...

We investigate a particular aspect of creditor rights, judicial efficiency, and its influence on firms' corporate leverage in 69 countries. Increasing creditor rights makes credit more readily available due to greater loan supply, but firms use less leverage to avoid premature liquidation. We find that efficient judicial systems are associated with...

We argue and find that negative ties are not always liabilities to workplace performance. Instead, negative ties can be beneficial depending on how socially distant they are from the person (i.e., whether they are direct or indirect negative ties), and how those ties are embedded with other ties. Results from a field study at a large life sciences...

Although multiple disciplines have been applied to the study of organizations, organizational research is rarely interdisciplinary in the sense of two or more disciplines being linked in the joint analysis of organizational phenomena. The articles in this special issue illustrate the kinds of insights that can be gained by moving from a purely disc...

We propose an affective relational theory (ART) in order to explain the trajectories that dyadic work relationships take over time and across the relational dynamic spectrum: from strengthening, to becoming dormant (neither engaged nor avoided), to decaying or even dying. We use the circumplex model to distinguish affective states according to thei...

New work in social network theory and research has begun to explore the role of social network process alongside social network structure. Where a first wave of social network research located social network process as implicit in social network structure, new work has argued for a more sophisticated capture of the social network action within soci...

Mergers fail, in part, because of employees’ negative merger responses, including reduced organizational identification and organizational attachment (i.e., lower commitment, job satisfaction intention to stay, and heightened employee turnover). We hypothesized two main theoretical pathways suggesting that: 1) increasing organizational valence (emp...

Despite organizational norms for consistency, and pressures for leaders and decision makers to be decisive and singular in their behavior, organizational scholars have recently begun to unveil the ubiquity of ambivalence in organizational settings. The focus of this proposed symposium is to join together four investigations that highlight an emergi...

We studied 459 Ukrainian civil servants to determine how career network-building behavioral tendencies relate to network range and promotion speed. We identify two main behavioral tendencies for initiating social relationships: (a) networking within formal structured groups organized around activities created specifically to encourage members to fo...

Most network research in organizations assumes away the dissociative forces instantiated in negative ties, instead pursuing ties that reflect only associative forces, to the detriment of understanding organizational networks. This essay provides a brief history of negative tie research in organizations; discusses different definitions of negative t...

We offer a theory and measure for determining powerful nodal positions based on potential inter-actor control in “politically charged” networks, which contain both allies and adversaries. Power is derived from actors that are dependent on the focal actor and sociometrically weak, either due to a lack of alternative allies or from being threatened b...

Recent years have witnessed the rapid proliferation and widespread adoption of a new class of information technologies, commonly known as social media. Researchers often rely on social network analysis (SNA) in attempting to understand these technologies, often without considering how the novel capabilities of social media platforms might affect th...

The central idea of this Panel Symposium is that it is easier to learn from and contribute to a field within management if one understands the implicit, mutually reinforcing norms of different Academy of Management Divisions. In order to understand these implicit norms, two of the Panel Symposium presentations will display bibliometric maps of the...

Organizational scholars are increasingly examining the implications of how employees are embedded in social networks in their work settings. While network research has frequently explored the benefits which follow from individuals experiencing positive interactions with others, the consequences of negative ties are less understood. Understanding th...

The article discusses conceptions of work as a focus of research in the area of organization and management. We consider obstacles in the study of work, including different disciplinary lenses used in research. We discuss the contributions of the articles in this special topic forum, as well as questions generated from them. We end by examining how...

The authors use a portfolio of sequential tasks to investigate how accurately study participants stick to assigned deadlines when they need to transition from one task to another. Atypical deadlines, task complexity, and individual differences all affect transition error size, error correction, and task performance. In Experiment 1 (N=108), larger...

We examine how employees' centrality in the networks of positively valenced ties (e.g., friendship, advice) and negatively valenced ties (e.g., avoidance) at work interact to affect these employees' organizational attachment. Using 2 different samples (154 employees in a division of a food and animal science organization and 144 employees in a prod...

Organizations are increasingly concerned about retaining human talent, particularly within knowledge-based industries where turnover is expensive. Our study employs a social network perspective to explore the influence of employees' formal and informal workplace relationships on their turnover intentions. We do this in a life sciences organization...

Recent years have witnessed the rapid proliferation and widespread adoption of a new class of information technologies, commonly known as social media. Researchers often rely on social network analysis (SNA) in attempting to understand these technologies, often without considering how the novel capabilities of social media platforms might affect...

Gossip is informal talking about colleagues. Taking a social network perspective, we argue that group boundaries and social status in the informal workplace network determine who the objects of positive and negative gossip are. Gossip networks were collected among 36 employees in a public child care organization, and analyzed using exponential rand...

An introduction into the use of a social network perspective to understand issues such as structural power within a network of relationships that can affect negotiations and their outcomes.

The use of network theory and methods to explain and predict outcomes related to complex systems is on the rise across a range of sciences, from physics and biology to sociology and psychology. Indeed, the applicability of network ideas across seemingly disparate systems is one of the most distinctive and promising features. Network theory represen...

The information systems (IS) literature has focused considerable research on IS resistance, particularly in the health-care industry. Most of this attention has focused on the impact of IS resistance on systems' initial implementation, but little research has investigated whether and how post-adoption resistance affects performance. We focus on a p...

Gossip is informal talking about colleagues. Taking a social network perspective, we argue that group boundaries and social status in the informal workplace network determine who the objects of positive and negative gossip are. Gossip networks were collected among 36 employees in a public child care organization, and analyzed using exponential rand...

By integrating core ideas from upper echelons research with competitive dynamics, our study explores how a firm’s stock market performance is jointly influenced by its top-level human capital and the pattern of competitive behavior the firm carries out against rivals. More specifically, we drew a sample of Fortune 500 firms that carried out nearly...

The article discusses conceptions of work as a focus of research in the area of organization and management. We consider obstacles in the study of work, including different disciplinary lenses used in research. We discuss the contributions of the articles in this special topic forum, as well as questions generated from them. We end by examining how...

Informal relationships that convey advice and knowledge are critical to knowledge flows in organizations, and these relationships are often impacted by interpersonal conflict. This study investigates the relationship of personal- and work-related conflict on advice seeking in a midsized US firm. Findings demonstrate that conflict might differential...

The authors use social network analysis to understand how employees’ propensity to engage in positive and negative gossip is driven by their underlying relationship ties.They find that expressive friendship ties between employees are positively related to engaging in both positive and negative gossip, whereas instrumental workflow ties, which are l...

We examine the phenomenon of interpersonal workplace exclusion (IWE) using both a sociometric and a psychometric approach. In our definition, IWE occurs when an employee is ignored, excluded by or intentionally kept apart from other individuals or groups of individuals in the workplace and/ or at work-related events. We find that being the target o...

Interest has been growing in understanding how organizations' aspiration levels affect their planning for future organizational change. Previous research has not specified whether organizations use direct competitors or other comparable organizations as referents for forming their aspirations. In this study, it is argued that organizations form the...

We examined perceptions differentiating key Colombian decisionmakers in 168 SMEs who decided to either internationalize or remain domestic. An integrative model compares managerial perceptions of competitive, macro-environmental and neo-institutional factors. Foreign MNEs in the home market significantly differentiated decisions to internationalize...

We investigate experimentally how temporal perception, task characteristics, and individual differences affect pacing and task transitions. 108 individuals were asked to manage task transitioning by dividing their time equally between two tasks. Transition errors were higher with atypical starting times, complex tasks, and for individuals with low...

Over the past decade, there has been an explosion of interest in network research across the physical and social sciences. For social scientists, the theory of networks has been a gold mine, yielding explanations for social phenomena in a wide variety of disciplines from psychology to economics. Here, we review the kinds of things that social scien...

In this chapter, we consider what a social network perspective might add to the study of justice in organizations. We begin with the assumption that em- ployees are embedded in networks of relationships that provide opportunities and constraints on behavior, affect, and cognitions. Going beyond the dyad, the social network perspective distinctively...

We studied 459 social servants to determine how their career network building behaviors were related to their social capital, and how this affected their speed of promotion within their organizational hierarchy. Results suggest that greater use of network building behaviors leads to greater range social capital, which leads to faster promotion. Fac...

We explore the role of negative relationships in the context of social networks in work organizations. Whereas network researchers have emphasized the benefits and opportunities derived from positive interpersonal relationships, we examine the social liabilities that can result from negative relationships in order to flesh out the entire "social le...

We introduce the concept of group social capital—the set of resources made available to a group through members' social relationships within the social structure of the group and in the broader formal and informal structure of the organization. We argue that greater group social capital resources lead to greater group effectiveness and that there a...

We examined the relationship between information technology (IT) and organizational performance in the U.S. life/health insurance industry by applying and testing Galbraith's information processing theory and strategic contingency theory. Rather than focusing on resource allocations in IT, we instead examined the manner in which IT is deployed in o...

We investigated variation in how deadlines are experienced based on whether they match culturally entrained milestones. Consequences for task performance were also examined. We manipulated starting times on two experimental tasks as prototypical (e.g., 4:00 p.m.) or atypical (e.g., 4:07 p.m). In one experiment, each of 20 task groups was to create...

Researchers have traditionally investigated aspects of the interorganizational monitoring process in piecemeal fashion. This conceptual piece argues that juxtaposing the categorization process with interorganizational emulation, imitation, and competition, brings focus to organizations' attempts to acquire information from other organizations, sign...

This study introduces the concept of group social capital, which is the configuration of group members' social relationships within a group and in the social structure of a broader organization, and tests the proposition that group effectiveness is maximized via optimal configurations of different conduits for such capital. These conduits include i...

We argue that employees' organizational justice perceptions are, in part, influenced by whom they associate with in the workplace. Consequently, we examine the link between different types of social ties and the interpersonal similarity of employees' perceptions of interactional, procedural, and distributive justice through a social network study i...

This article discusses the multilevel nature of group social capital (GSC). GSC is the set of resources made available to a group through group members' social relationships within the group's social structure, as well as through the group's position in the broader formal and informal structure of the organization. GSC is a meta-construct comprised...